*****Here's where you can download the game. I left the rest of the thread intact for anyone interested in reliving the journey. Unfortunately I lost both the build of the game and the backup I had of it so there will be no more updates

And the Facebook page. I'm trying to spread the word about this game because I am really proud of it, and when combined with a few friends and a few drinks, it is a whole lot of fun. So the more you like and share it, the more it helps me do that.www.facebook.com/rampandroll

If this is in the wrong forum, someone let me know. I wasn't sure if this qualifies as a "project announcement!" I didn't want to post anything until I had something to show and download. In fact I think the only forum member that knows about this is WellFedGames. If you were following my game build VOA, forgive me. I haven't given up on it but some of it is over my head and I needed an easier project to run through first. Specifically something without AI. My modelling skills have improved and I have remade every object for voa since last update and it looks fantastic! I am however having problems making the puppies have any sort of personality. Hopefully this skeeball sim will be a nice stepping stone for me to work on my programming skills.

Here it is, in the same style as world class bowling and shuffleshot - 3d skeeball. Except it can't be called skeeball, because they sue! Literally. Google Brewski Ball for details on that... So help me name it, any and all names considered. My wife suggested Whee!Ball but That still sounds like trouble. Though I doubt even if I called it Skee Ball there would be trouble, I really donít want to have the hassle if it ever does come up.

The programs I used to create this are:Blender for modelling and texturingGimp for making said texturesUnity for the game engine with Nvidia's PhysX for handling gravityInternet for the carpet texture! I tried to make my own but I couldn't beat this one

Here is a basic version of skeeball that lets you chuck balls and it tallies the score. I can view the score being tallied (and it works!) but there is no visual representation implemented yet. It counts the balls you throw as well - but you can throw infinite balls at this stage. When you throw a ball and it goes into the goal, it shows the score box for a few seconds... but there's nothing there yet! Also, the audio manager is working but there are no sounds yet. I'll zip something up in the next few days (it's the weekend!) and post another version. Next Saturday I have a group of people coming in to the studio to record some voice over things so I have some stuff for this as well for them to lay down in the style of the Shuffleshot heckling.

As it is, the sensitivity for the mouse works great for my laptop and mouse(not the little trackpad, but an actual mouse.) There is no way to change it on this version, so I hope it works out for you. It will be added to the menu when I get to that. For controls, you have:Left viewTop viewRight ViewScore ViewSlow-MotionExit Game

Score view can be pushed at any time, however the others can only be pushed after the ball is in motion. Set these up before you play! In the actual version you will be able to change these controls in the service menu.

Also this is my first time posting a download link to my dropbox, so let me know if it didn't work for some reason!

The above picture is a render, and not an in-game. Here are a few in game screens in 4:3 from my office computer. I can see that one of the wood textures ended up getting misaligned, will add that to the list of things to fix!

Yeah that needs to be addressed. Im at work now and can only get the ball over the hump by shooting down the long way of my mouse pad. I hope to have at least a basic menu set up soon so that this can be addressed. Perhaps try playing at a higher resolution - I seem to be able to throw with more power the higher I go.

Yeah that needs to be addressed. Im at work now and can only get the ball over the hump by shooting down the long way of my mouse pad. I hope to have at least a basic menu set up soon so that this can be addressed. Perhaps try playing at a higher resolution - I seem to be able to throw with more power the higher I go.

Works well with the mouse on the pin controller, but the shooter rebounds so fast that it messes up. Got caught in the net several times -- rolled out of the right side, but not from the left.Also wondering why no gutterball action if you clear the ramp, but are outside the outermost scoring ring?

I will add a gutter. I was going off of memory and a cutaway drawing of a ramp when I drew it up, there's no real skeeball that I'm aware of on the island where I live Looking at photos I see what you mean. Won't be an issue to add.

The net collision is something I need to investigate. I believe the mesh is too thin for detection, so I will try adding some larger, invisible colliders.

I also will hide the mouse pointer, and straighten the score-holes... they are a little off-centre

Awesome, I have a list to work with now. I'll put some triggers in case the ball leaves the play area. I will probably have something up in the next day with some of the easier changes. If only I wasn't at work right now...

Are the view buttons something I should take out? Should I just automate the switching of cameras?

Also for the ramp angle, it so happens that this is the photo I used as a reference which is on the uncle t site. New revision probably up later this afternoon...

This is perfect timing as I was just playing some Golden Tee and World Class Bowling with my friend. I am very excited about this project as I think it would fit in nicely with those games and Shuffleshot.

I played with my trackball and it was also difficult for me to get speed but otherwise its working well. My only suggestion right now is to stop the ball from rolling on it's own before you toss it. It has a tendency to slowly roll even if the mouse is still.

That's cool! One critique I'd make is the controls are a little wonky. In my game I could see the cursor moving around independently of the ball, and it was jarring. Seemed to me it should be 1:1 movement with the mouse cursor but maybe that doesn't work well. But overall controls seemed overly sensitive.

That's cool! One critique I'd make is the controls are a little wonky. In my game I could see the cursor moving around independently of the ball, and it was jarring. Seemed to me it should be 1:1 movement with the mouse cursor but maybe that doesn't work well. But overall controls seemed overly sensitive.

If you read the thread you will see that it is a work in progress, and the ability to control the settings will be implemented in the future.

Update:

The camera controls have been scrapped. It is now automated and adds some variety. I think I have the collisions figured out. You can still throw the ball out of bounds if you do something weird, but there's a button that trigger the next ball if you get it stuck which does happen occasionally. I am going to add a slope to the sides so the ball rolls back into play if it ends up there. I have automated the process of skipping to the next ball if it ends up out of bounds... which should be hard to do but possible.

Mostly it's a camera update with some minor changes to geometry and it plays much better. Still no setting the sensitvity, I'll get to that...

I went out of town, and was crashing on a friends couch having the worst sleep ever when I realized a better way to adjust the settings. I threw it together in an hour, so hopefully I am done with the service menu and the game can now be played as a one player game properly and with minimal hassle besides initial set up.

As before, hold Alt when you start up for the first time to map buttons!

New things added:

More sounds!The ball's rolling audio pitch changes depending on speed... not 100% happy with the sound I made, but this one is temporary and acceptable for now.Easier service menu for setting up your mouse/trackball sensitivity.Settings save properly now and don't reset when you go into the service menuAdded a default settings button in the service menuSome leaner code throughout. Runs about the same as it did before, but there's a lot more going on.

New download link!

**Outdated link removed

Things I know about:If you push the next ball button, weird things happen. I know what the problem is, so it will be fixed soon. It works as is but acts strangely and I don't think it counts the balls.The ball rolling noise continues on into the holes and doesn't stop until the next ball.Players 2/3/4 don't work.The high score board doesn't work.

I once again changed the ramp angle. It's close... not 100% but getting there.

Rendered all lighting, so there's no extra processing going on for that (one of the most intensive processes)

Faked a shadow for the ball

Optimized the coding. I do a bunch of logging to make sure it runs smoothly and it apparently affects the build version of the game so I commented it out

Added some more sound effects

Again fixed the service menu. Still need to move some text around...

With all of these improvements, the game runs at a steady 60fps on my laptop which is older and has only on board graphics. Unfortunately I can't get it to run on my arcade machine, probably because of the tiny xp missing something or older graphics card that doesn't support some sort of shading or something.

I again changed the ramp angle, added some weight to the ball, etc. Works for me the vast, vast majority of the time.

**Outdated link removed

Apart from writing and recording some music, and getting a group together to record crowd noises I am up to a part I am having troubles with: implementing the multiplayer aspect. I am not much of a coder but am learning more every day, and I hope to have that part done by Friday the 26th. Not promising anything, but I am busy playing guitar at an out of town wedding this weekend so it will have to wait until next week.

The code itself I can write - I just know that there is a better, more automated way to go about it than the way I know how to do it, and if I don't push myself I will never learn. My way would be like 50 lines or more of code (if statements to the moon!), and I think there's a way to do it in ten or less.

I have been busy, and haven't even begun on the multiplayer code. After the wedding I had guests staying with me all week, had to edit the wedding photos etc etc. While I had those peeps in my house I did however get them recording the crowd noises I wanted for the game. They are not the voice actors I am used to using, but they did the job for now. I have different guests coming tomorrow and even more guests coming on Saturday so I will do a few more recordings and layer them as time goes on. If I haven't mentioned, I live on an island and people love to come visit.

So the new version including the crowd noises is up. I built the audio system to use an appropriate base sound, like booing, cheering, gasping etc and after a small delay occasionally a one-liner. The delay is currently 1.5 seconds, I just threw that in an went with it but I may change that to .75 or 1 second.

Now when the game is exited, it shows a credits screen for 4 seconds before exiting. Might as well give credit where it's due!

Also I want a name change. Whee Ball is closer than Brewski Ball, and Skeeball (the company) is suing for being too close to the original name. The only one that comes to mind is Carny Bowling. But I'd need a super badass logo for that name and my art skills are not up to the task.

Heh. Yeah. Whipped up the graphic to put it in the right light. Seemed somewhat appropriate considering the soundtrack. BTW, is this a commercial venture? I wasn't quite clear on where this was heading ultimately.

I was thinking of putting it up for free with a suggested donation amount. I haven't had time to work on it much these past few weeks but been brewing ideas in my head to figure out coding the multiplayer.

Middle of November I'm bringing a drummer into the studio (I own a small recording studio) to lay down real drums and then I'll redo all the guitars and bass and have a pianist brought in for some rock and roll organ and a proper remix for the music.

I do like the name and will get back to you if I use it. Gonna get some other opinions on it. I have a few more smilar yet different ideas for other games I may put together after this one. More trackball games FTW!

So no updates.I am making slow progress, but it seems like every time I make some headway I break something else. I'm not much of a programmer and looking back I realize I should have just made it multiplayer capable from the get go... or at least planned ahead so it could be more easily implemented. Oh well...

The next version of Unity comes out before Xmas and includes some really great features that will make the game look better, may improve the physics (though I am quite happy with how it is now after tweaking my sensitivity settings) and will improve the final build so it may run faster.

I also plan on doing some side art on the skeeball machine to break up the monotony of the red. So some little cosmetic changes are in the works as well.

Well, after much debate I have decided to steal use Randy's design and name for my game. Also, I have just had a private session with a programmer who showed me like 10 different ways to solve the problem I was having with my code, and if I can remember any of it I should have something working in a few days!

Well! I got sick of Battlefield 4 and jumped into this. Spent a few hours hacking up my old code to include the new... and here is the newest release. Same old controls obviously, slightly tweaked but I think things are good now. 4 players, added a player number splash between turns, worked in some more audio code that has no audio attached to it yet.

The high score page at the end is even more broken than it was before! So forgive that until I deal with it. In the meantime I have a drum recording session on Saturday, I'll lay down lots of guitars on Sunday, and get more voices recorded Sunday night.

*Updated again this morning. Fixed some weird scoring issue I had created and then sometimes it wouldn't update which player it was. Also updates when a new round starts so that the board isn't left showing the last player's score and number, even though you could barely see it. Playing with the timing of things like the screen splash to make it flow a little better. Pacing is everything.

**Outdated link removed

4 players!

Splashy!

I also want to change the ball's colour, giving each player something different. As usual, anything I haven't mentioned please bring to my attention!

**another edit**I discovered another but where the game over screen appears a round early. It's on the list!

So I had a drummer in the studio this morning. I've worked with him in the past for a few commercials but he as a baby now and I haven't seen him much in the last year or so. His name is Scott and he was definitely on his A game today. One of the songs was done on the first take. Another was one take until he missed the last note, so we did a quick punch and was done. The third song wasn't so smooth. After a few failed attempts I grabbed the magic studio wand (a large safety orange plastic rod) and signaled the changes for him. We got 3 out of 4 tracks recorded with drums. I will likely get a different drummer in for the last track just for some variety. After the guys left (we also had a film crew in) I laid down some guitar tracks on one of the tunes. They sound way better than the scratch tracks I had in game before, I can hardly wait to mix them and put them in!

One thing I did appear to reduce even further was the number of balls that roll back after throwing. It's not 100% yet but it's getting there. I have not put this new version up yet though because the textures are all weird after I did it, and I am waiting on the art files from Randy because of course I took his name and the whole project will be rebranded! I figure I will wait until I have that done before I re-render all the lighting because it takes a long time to do so.

I slapped together a Facebook page for it if you are into that kind of thing, but if you are please don't post a download link for the demos. I will do so when I'm ready.

Barry, one of the camera guys doing a run around of the drums. We had 14 mics up or so.

Here's me wiping dust off some isolation headphones... Barry was sitting in the room with the drums

Setting up some more cameras. I was impressed Scott could drum with all the cameras pointed at him.

Well Randy and I have been in touch about the rebranding and once I have time the art will go through a major overhaul. I have a few hours on the boat this week where I can sip coffee and do some programming. Until then, here's a short video of the drum recording session!

I must be doing something wrong. I can start a game, but I can't get a ball to roll up the ramp no matter how I spin my trackball or which button or joystick I press or move. Also, in the menu for key mapping, when I double-click on a selection to try to change its mapping, nothing happens. Any ideas?

I must be doing something wrong. I can start a game, but I can't get a ball to roll up the ramp no matter how I spin my trackball or which button or joystick I press or move. Also, in the menu for key mapping, when I double-click on a selection to try to change its mapping, nothing happens. Any ideas?

Well, there are a few things that might cause these problems.

If you can move the ball but there's not enough power, press P and up the sensitivity of the Y axis. You want it to be sort of capable of flying up and hitting the top cage but only at full speed.

If you can't move the ball, perhaps your trackball isn't set up as a mouse and is instead put on an encoder or something? Currently the game is set up to work with mouse input for movement.

If your buttons are on a keyboard encoder then they should work. I will add gamepad encoder input to the list of things to add to the game, and maybe over the xmas holidays implement it. Shouldn't be too difficult!

If you can't change the keyboard inputs with a keyboard... I dunno.

I have a new version to upload tomorrow afternoon with some new fixes I added the other day. If it isn't too much work I will add gamepad input as well! We'll see how much free time I end up with!

I have been working on some of the nitty gritty timing issues with the game. I want the pacing to be perfect. I cut user control in a few more places during the game, mostly when there is text over the screen for example when it is a new player's turn and there is a banner over most of the screen. I've got some more coding to do today, and want to change the way the machine looks again, I tried adding the logo on the sides and it really isn't looking how I'd hoped. That's fine shouldn't take me too long to do.

I'm uploading a new version now, so try downloading in an hour or so from this post to check out the new features. Here is the download link:

**Outdated link removed

Very exciting news, I also added joystick support for those that have a gamepad interface that were having issues. I havent tested it yet, but let me know!

I spent most of the morning making up a better ending to the game that shows up to 4 player's scores. A few more lines of code and it will be ready, and I will update the download link for testing. That will be version .99! Excitement levels are pretty high right now. I just need a few more hours recording and mixing audio and some time changing up the graphics and it will be ready for the first official release!

Today is the day! The big 1.0 release that I have been working towards. Unfortunately there are some things that fell out of my control... musicians. For some reason they are often a flaky bunch, and when I asked the bassist to be done before week 3 of January, I actually meant that deadline. She didn't finish the tracks, so they haven't been mixed and are not in the game. I will of course put out a new version when I have the bass lines in and music mixed.

BUT

The show must go on, and I said it would be out end of January. So let me present to you, Ramp and Roll, Version 1.0. This is it, the game, in its entirety. Any further releases will likely not add any further functionality but little things like new music tracks etc. and the occasional bug fix.

I just got a trackball in trade so I look forward to trying your game once I integrate that into my cab. From the other projects you've shared and the course of this thread I think it should be a great addition to a cab with a trackball.

Thanks! so far the release has been a little slow. I have a contest up on my facebook page right now trying to spread awareness of its existence.

Here's an update I'm not happy with. Bass player said she won't have time to complete the tracks for a long while, and that it's low on her list of priorities. So I have decided to dump her from this and another project of mine (a film) she "might not have time for." Since nobody has even heard the awesome tracks she has put down so far I have decided to just do the bass myself. I know it won't be as good since I think more like a guitar player than a bassist, but the show must go on and I would really like to be done with this project so I may begin my next. For my next game, I am teaming up with a 13 year old who lives down the street to create a very short horror game named "Angela" based on a short story he wrote. We've got lots of ideas and I am keeping the difficulty in check. Basically you end up walking around a mansion collecting clues, and each time you unlock a piece of the puzzle the story is read. Shouldn't take more than a week to complete, since all the scripting is very easy and can be reused (opening doors, audio, etc)

But the next solo arcade style game I plan on building is Lawn Darts. Probably begin in the spring/summer.

I recorded the bass lines, and mixed the music today. I added a few more little bug fixes and really played with the audio. It's a lot better than the 1.0 release now! I recommend downloading it and giving it a shot if you haven't already, and if you have this new version is totally worth getting. Download it from my website, www.permanentrecords.ca/games

it took 300 mouse clicks to get the sensitivity about right..why increments of .05?

I tried having a slider control and that wasn't working very well because depending on the controls you are using the sensitivity can vary wildly. For example, on my laptop, with mouse, the sensitivity is at 1.05 and that seems to work pretty good. With the trackpad, it goes to 12. Which is a lot of mouse clicks. On my desktop with mouse, it goes to 2. My trackball has to be around 5. So that is a very large scale and having a slider just wasn't really big enough to let you set it with any sort of accuracy. And of course if you are using a 4:3 screen, it became even smaller. Since this only has to be set once, I thought it was the best way to go.

Well, that is a very very occasional occurance, and precisely why there's the "dead ball" button. It resets the ball. I think this happens when you either get it right up there in the corners (which is why those pins are there, to try to keep the ball out) or if the ball is going too fast, the 3d meshes might be getting stuck together? If this is the case it's usually a case of the sensitivity being too high.

I put up a new version today. Unity 5 came out and I played with some of the new features. I also changed the game a little bit by adding just the tiniest amount of bounce to the ball. The new lighting engine is a bit PITA but I finally got it going. Here are some photos to compare,

Before:

and after:

The physically based shading seems quite smooth, at a cost of like 4x the rendering time. Even for a small scene like this it was pretty unbearable.

Where is the data stored for this game? I erase everything but it keeps my settings. I think the old versions are messing my game up. As soon as the game starts the ball quickly rolls to the left side and stays there. I've had this problem before but I can't shake it now.

Edit: It looks like doing the hold Control start eliminates the issue.

That little bounce has made the game much better. I had no issues getting over the ramp.

A few glitches:-Ball got stuck on wall behind 50 pt ring-Ball bounced between the 30 and 40 pt ring infinitely until I pressed ctrl (this happened more than once)-After a 4 player game, only the scores for players 1 and 2 showed up on the board

Thanks! I'll look into the ball getting stuck. I had it happen once where it just flew up and got impaled on a peg, but it only happened the once and I thought it was just an isolated incident. I think the new version doesn't handle collisions the same and I just need to wrap my head around it.

So I added a few invisible spheres and boxes to prevent the ball landing somewhere it may get stuck. I played several full, solo 4 player games and didn't have a single issue. So hopefully that clears it up for everyone!

The scoreboard is fixed, but the fact that it was broken sort of confuses me. I upgraded from unity 4.6 to the new 5, and sure I expected some problems. But the scoreboard actually had errors in the code that I'm pretty sure weren't there before - like, it reverted to an older version somehow. Either way it was a really easy fix but I hope there aren't other problems like that elsewhere.

The final change I did was something I had planned to do a long time ago. I changed the ball counter on the scoreboard to show balls remaining instead of the current ball number as the game logic sees it. Not a big deal and many people likely won't even notice - but when it says zero, that means you are on the last ball, because there's none left! I hope that makes sense!

It's uploading now so hopefully it will be done in about 30 minutes (I upload 3 versions at once).

I played with it for a while. I had no more issues with the ball getting stuck on the wall behind the 50 pt ring. One time it did get stuck between 30 and 40. It was a direct shot that landed right in between the rings.

I have made a few changes, and hopefully fixed that glitch where the ball would get stuck (happened to me a few times as well.) I fixed the bug where the deadball button would skip over a player, now it goes to the next one as intended. I also made a start on my next game, Head's Up! which is a lawn darts game, similar style to this one but will have more features as I am getting better as a programmer. The third pic is in-game footage, and I've barely made a start on it... should look really good!

Last update for R&R I think. I could keep tweaking it forever but unless there's some bugs or something, I'm going to call it done! Whew! It was a lot of fun working on that, and now I'm 90% done my similar arcade basketball game. After that comes my lawn darts game which is so far the best looking of the bunch. That one shouldn't take me too long. I finally think I have what it takes to complete VOA if anyone remembers that project. And after that I was thinking of making a lightgun game... lots of good and bad ideas for that

I'm uploading the newest versions of Ramp and Roll now. Should be ready to download in about an hour. It adds 2 new features:

1) a setup menu that doesn't suck. Changing/comparing sensitivities is much easier now that it includes a slider system.2) when you are ready to throw the ball, it behaves more like in world class bowling: the ball doesn't keep rolling around after you stop "touching" it.

I know there has not been any posts since April but I just came across this and would like to have it running on my multi-cade but I cannot access the settings (by holding ALT). I can start the game and access the service menu with P but nothing happens when I hold ALT. I am using an X-arcade KB encoder so the trackball is a mouse but nothing happens by default other than the arrow to select the number of players.

I would gladly make a donation if the game was functional since we are big skeeball fans, one of my wife's favorites.

Immediately after double clicking the executable, hold alt before anything loads. That should bring up the menu. I'll download the version that's up and try it out just to make sure. I don't have a mac, but am trying the 32 and 64 bit windows versions since you didn't specify.

Also whoever stickied this, thanks!

*I tried and both of them work just fine. If you can't get it to work, I don't know what to tell you... maybe try using a different keyboard?

The controls in the setup menu have a space for Horizontal and Vertical, however those are only there if your trackball is seen as a game device and not mouse. Mouse is enabled and not available to deselect. Therefore, if your mouse controls the cursor on the menu it will work in the game. Set your controls in the setup menu for all the buttons. The slow-mo is stupid - was a good idea but I didn't implement it from the start and therefore isn't all it could have been if I had. Load the game, press P or whatever you had for the service menu, and increase the sensitivity for both horizontal and vertical. My mouse requires them to be around 3.5, and my trackball around 5 (ultimarc U Trak) then press the save button in the lower left.After a few moments it will reload the title screen. Insert some quarters, and give it a go. Keep on adjusting until a hard throw hits the back wall. I like my horizontal setting to be a little lower than vertical.

Make sure you press the save button! If that still doesn't work, verify that when you load the service mode screen that it is indeed set to where you last saved it.